Building Novel VHF-Based Wireless Sensor Networks for the Internet of Marine Things

• Published in: IEEE sensors journal Vol. 18; no. 5; pp. 2131 - 2144
• Main Authors: Al-Zaidi, Rabab, Woods, John C., Al-Khalidi, Mohammed, Huosheng Hu
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.03.2018; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: 5G mobile communication; Ad hoc networks; Cartography; Communication satellites; Data acquisition; Data transmission; Delay; delay tolerant networks; Environmental monitoring; information centric networks; Internet; Internet of marine things; Marine environment; Marine vehicles; Mobile ad hoc networks; Ocean temperature; Remote sensors; Satellite communications; Sensors; Ships; Switching theory; Synchronism; Very high frequencies; very high frequency; Vessels; Wind speed; Wireless communications; Wireless networks; Wireless sensor networks
• ISSN: 1530-437X; 1558-1748
• DOI: 10.1109/JSEN.2018.2791487

Traditional marine monitoring systems such as oceanographic and hydrographic research vessels use either wireless sensor networks with a limited coverage, or expensive satellite communication that is not suitable for small and mid-sized vessels. This paper proposes a novel Internet of Marine Things data acquisition and cartography system in the marine environment using Very High Frequency (VHF) available on the majority of ships. The proposed system is equipped with many sensors such as sea depth, temperature, wind speed and direction, and the collected data is sent to 5G edge cloudlets connected to sink/base station nodes on shore. The sensory data is ultimately aggregated at a central cloud on the internet to produce up to date cartography systems. Several observations and obstacles unique to the marine environment have been discussed and feed into the solutions presented. The impact of marine sparsity on the network is examined and a novel hybrid Mobile Ad-hoc/Delay Tolerant routing protocol is proposed to switch automatically between Mobile Ad-hoc Network and Delay Tolerant Network routing according to the network connectivity. The low rate data transmission offered by VHF radio has been investigated in terms of the network bottlenecks and the data collection rate achievable near the sinks. A data synchronization and transmission approach has also been proposed at the 5G network core using Information Centric Networks.